149 Quotes by Steven Weinberg

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.

Fine Structure Constant: Fundamental numerical constant of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics, defined as the square of the charge of the electron divided by the product of Planck's constant and the speed of light.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion

One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.

La religion est une insulte à la dignité humaine. Que ce soit avec ou sans elle, il y aura toujours des gens bien qui font de bonnes choses, et des mauvais qui font de mauvaises choses. Mais pour que des gens bien agissent mal, il faut la religion.

Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Issac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.